You’re adding two new features to your app: a photo feature and a video feature. By clicking a new “Quick Photo” button, users can take a photo. By clicking a new “Quick Video” button, users can shoot a video. However, you’re not sure how to best arrange the buttons in the UI. You have two candidate designs. One design looks like this:

The other design places the two new buttons lower down in the UI, like this:

Using Mobile Analytics, you can specify application-specific configurations that choose which mobile design to show the user. You can then leverage analytics to determine which design drives the most engagement with customers.

Step 1: Create the layouts

Create the layouts for each of the two candidate designs and include them in your application. Let’s assume that you call one layout ‘dashboard” and the other layout ‘dashboard_alternate’.

Step 2: Specify app-specific settings

Open the Default Configs page. This will apply the configuration to all devices running your app. Then in the Application Specific Configs section of the page, specify a category, key, and value for the new photo and video features and for one of the layouts , for example:

Category

Key

Value

FEATURES

enableCamera

true

FEATURES

enableVideo

true

LAYOUT

dashboard

alternate

The category groups together configured features. What you include in each category is also up to you. In this example, FEATURES is a category that includes new features such as the photo and video features. LAYOUT is a category that includes the layouts.

The Key identifies a particular feature. In this case, enableCamera identifies the photo feature, enableVideo identifies the video feature, and dashboard identifies a layout.

The Value controls the handling of the feature. In this example, the value ‘true’ for enableCamera and enableVideo means that the photo feature and video feature will be turned on in the app, respectively. The ‘alternate’ value for dashboard means that the ‘dashboard_alternate’ layout will be turned on in the app.

Step 3: Choose a design based on a configuration

Add code to your app that enables Mobile Analytics to get the configuration so that your app can expose one of the two designs. For example, here’s the code you would need to write for the Android version of your app:

For iOS, you will need to use the iOS application-specific configuration APIs. See the section “Optional: Enable application-specific configuration” in Add monitoring to your iOS application for details.

When the user runs your app, the dashboard_alternate layout is displayed because ‘dashboard’ is set to ‘alternate’ in the application-specific configuration.

Step 4: Monitor the impact of the design

Use Mobile analytics to monitor the usage of your app as described in Monitor your app’s use. This gives you analytics for the app with one of the competing designs.

You can track the number of users who use your app as well as the number of unique sessions established with your app. You can also look at the metrics summary for the average session length in seconds.

Step 5: Change the layout

Change the layout displayed in your app. You can do this simply by changing the dashboard setting value. Users then see the other layout the next time they start your app.

Again examine the analytics for your app. The better of the competing designs should have a positive impact, such as in increased usage of the app or a longer average session length. You can also instrument the buttons with Google Analytics or Apigee App Services event tracking to see if users are clicking the buttons more often in one design as compared to the other. (See Counters & events for further information about event tracking in App Services.)

You can then factor the analytics into your choice of designs.

Expose alternative designs in a Beta Test or A/B Test

You can also try out alternative designs with a smaller set of users. You can do this using a Beta Test configuration or A/B test configuration, and integrating the configuration into your code. For details, see Configure your app .